The official opening of Struga Poetry Evenings (SPE) Festival will kick off Wednesday evening in Struga by planting a tree and poetry reading in honour to the winner of the Golden Wreath award – Charles Simic. The 56th edition of the festival will open in the courtyard of the House of Poetry in Struga with international poetry reading “Poetic Meridians.”
The festival’s five-day programme will include symposium “Lost/Found in translation,” poetry portrait of the winner of the Golden Wreath of SPE for 2017, Charles Simic, poetry portrait of Goran Colakhodzic, the laureate of Bridges of Struga award of SPE and UNESCO and presentation of the Miladinov Brothers award winner. The Festival will also feature nights of European poetry platform Versopolis.
Poetry manifestation Bridges of Struga and presentation of awards to this year’s winners will close the festival on Aug.27. On Aug. 28 the festival will continue in Skopje with poetry matinee Matka and international poetry meeting at Macedonia Square, near Stone Bridge.
American poet Charles Simic is born in 1938 in Belgrade. He is also an essayist, translator, editor, and professor emeritus of creative writing and literature at the University of New Hampshire, where taught for over 30 years.
He received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990 and was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1995, received the Academy Fellowship in 1998. He was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2000. Simic was one of the judges for the 2007 Griffin Poetry Prize and continues to contribute poetry and prose to The New York Review of Books. Simic received the US$100,000 Wallace Stevens Award in 2007 from the Academy of American Poets. He was selected by James Billington, Librarian of Congress, to be the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, succeeding Donald Hall. In 2011, he was the recipient of the Frost Medal, presented annually for “lifetime achievement in poetry.
